I have seen the Fabled Land

On Thursday morning I had a work session cancelled and regained a couple of hours. I had seen that Fable 5 dropped and would be available under my subscription until June 22. After then it would only be available via Anthropic’s API i.e. pay-as-you-go. As most developers know, that means way more expensive. It’s a sign of what’s to come.

My plan was to maximise this 10 day gold rush period, use Fable to crank out some apps that “scratch my own itch” and then maintain them using the still phenomenal Opus models (or even - gasp - manually coding features).

I wrote a 2 short paragraph spec and pointed Fable 5 at the file, asked it to review and build it out. The result was impressive. It really can one-shot things and it works really well unattended. Looking back at file creation times and Git commits it built my app in just over half an hour.

How is it different?

The first days of Opus 4.8 (only 3 weeks ago) felt clunky. 4.8 was clearly much better at coding than 4.6, but it felt more in the way. The experience was jittery and it would get fixated on certain testing issues. That led to better outcomes, but the journey was annoying.

Fable 5 - for the short time it was here - smoothed out all of that and its design capabilities were a real leap forward. You had to tell it not to do that whole coral colour scheme that Claude seems to reach for A LOT, but it listened.

Your joy has been postponed

And then the plug was pulled and I was scuppered. As Robert Burns put it,

The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men

Gang aft agley,

Will Fable come back before the 22nd? Will Anthropic extend the subscription window? Maybe this ban is sufficient free marketing for Anthropic to exclude it from the plan on day one of launch.

I tried Fable 5 briefly and it was great; and to all those that say generative AI is just predicting the next word in a sentence, that is actually a phenomenal ability. Maybe it’s a large part of what we humans are.